Sunday, March 05, 2006

Upset!

Yes, folks, there was a big upset on TV today... Korea beat Japan in the WBC!

But seriously, I might have something intelligent to say if I had actually seen Crash. But I have a sneakin' suspicion that Brokeback Mountain wuz robbed. At least Ang Lee got his Oscar.

Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer for The New World, wuz robbed too. By the way, you guys should all go see that movie while it's still in theatres. Terrence Malick directs like a poet.

Jon Stewart was very funny. Best host in years. And I'm not even a "Daily Show" fan. But please explain to me why we need any montages besides the ones for the honorary Oscar (Robert Altman is the man) and for the dead people (When did they prepare that? They didn't get Don Knotts or Dennis Weaver in.)

10 Comments:

Here's an oddity. Both of the last two Best Pictures were primarily set in the Los Angeles area. That in itself wouldn't be an oddity, except for the fact that I believe these are the only two Best Pictures in Oscar history to be primarily set there (a few others had scenes in L.A. but were primarily set somewhere else).

There were four pointless montages (biopics, film noir, message movies, and epics). While Chuck Workman has made good montages before (like "100 Years at the Movies," frequently seen on TCM), some of the montages tonight used the exact same clips which Workman had used in other montages (not just the same movies, the same shots).

I'm not sure why both Sid Ganis and Jake Gyllenhaal derided DVDs; I thought that Hollywood actually earns more from DVDs than theatrical exhibition. Maybe they should have saved those remarks for ShoWest (the movie theater owners' convention).

Re: LA-set Best Picture winners. AMERICAN BEAUTY was filmed on location around Southern California (including at my high school, according to the IMDB), but is Southern California ever explicitly made to be the setting of the film, or is it just set in "Suburbia, U.S.A.?"

A couple of other movies have scenes in L.A.... ANNIE HALL and RAIN MAN come to mind. But you're right about movies explicitly set here. Odd.

I can't find any photos online to prove it, but all the phone numbers shown in "American Beauty" had either 847 or 312 area codes (the northern suburbs of Chicago and downtown Chicago, respectively). I don't think there was any dialogue to specifically identify the location beyond that.

By the way, I didn't consider the homoerotic Westerns montage "pointless" since its function was to supply topical humor.

The other four montages I listed as pointless could have been removed from this year's Oscars and used up one each year for the next four years. But the Western montage was specifically intended as a joke referring to one of the current year's nominees.

It doesn't go strictly by the calendar year; it just goes by whenever they put together the clips. Johnny Carson died in January of 2005 but showed up in the tribute clip a couple months later. But I guess they put it together at least a few weeks ago, considering the absence of Knotts.

I don't know about best pics, (can't remember last years) but don't forget L.A. Confidential. Living away from LA for so long, you can tell when something is *meant* to look like it's set here. That's why seeing ads for GTA: San Andreas made me really homesick. I think it's similar to the way I can pick out a California accent when I'm out of the state now. Most notably was the dude from Huntington Beach that I met in Venice because I recognized his accent.